Isolating Root Causes

I was reading materials in preparation for a class on safety and quality improvement. It’s a multiple months-long course with a lot of physicians and statistics. It’s not material I’m naturally good at. I have a part to play as a spiritual caregiver in what we’re planning. I am useful even if I’m not a nurse or respiratory tech or, certainly, not a doctor.

I’m learning interesting things. I’m hearing even more interesting things about our hospital and about hospital systems in general. I’m learning more than I thought I would when I joined the team to work on our project.

In the pre-course work for our session on analyzing data, the final sentence on the slide was this: Please create two to three visualizations in an effort to isolate root causes / key drivers. This was a sentence about measures and hypotheses and graphs and tools.

As I think of it now, this sentence can go in many directions. What would it look like if you prepared a visual to capture the things that were causing you trouble? What would the visual addressing those causes and drivers include?